My teacher died last night. Death hasn’t touched me often; in fact since the passing of my grandfather almost thirty years ago I haven’t lost anyone very close to me. So I’m going through unfamiliar waves of sadness and something much like bewilderment. Pondering the whole “what-does-it-all-mean”-ness of death is almost banal, but this news coming as it does on Hiroshima Day is bringing up a lot of thoughts. Writing this, I guess, is a way of trying to get it straight in my head.
Rōshi as I remember him, on the lanai at Kaimu wearing palaka
Robert Baker Aitken was born on June 19, 1917 in Philadelphia, not far from where I’d be born forty-nine years later. I don’t remember what, if anything, he ever told me about his early life, but I know he lived in what was then the Territory of Hawaii as a boy. He went to Guam for work after high school, and was there when the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese took him prisoner and brought him to Kobe, where he was kept in a hotel with other Westerners.
One of them was Dr. R.H. Blyth, a British scholar and Zen practitioner with a Japanese wife who sought – and was denied – Japanese citizenship when the war began. Blyth sensei, who had been a student of the legendary Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki, was always called “Dr. B.” by the internees, and Aitken Rōshi used to remark on how the old expat loved the mix of respect and informality that the nickname conferred. Aitken learned about haiku, Zen and anarchism from Blyth sensei, and would spend the war years learning Japanese and poring through the small remnant of Blyth’s library, which was destroyed in a US bombing raid. After the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – sixty-five years ago today – the prisoners were released.
After the war, Blyth sensei stayed to help in the reconstruction, and helped write the ningen sengen declaration that the Americans demanded the Emperor recite. Blyth sensei was crafty enough in court Japanese to leave enough wiggle room in the statement so that the more conservative elements of society wouldn’t revolt. Aitken returned to Honolulu, got a Bachelor’s in literature and a Master’s in Japanese at UH, and went to the Bay Area to study at Berkeley. When Senzaki Rōshi brought his ‘floating zendo’ to town, Aitken was there, and he ended up leaving with Senzaki when the zendo floated down to LA. He studied with Senzaki Rōshi for years, and from him got the Dharma name Chotan (“Deep Pool”).
Senzaki Rōshi told Aitken he should go back to Japan to study haiku and Zen, and so he did in 1950. He ended up in Ryūtaku-ji, the temple built in the foothills of Mount Fuji by Hakuin Zenji, the great Zen master, poet and painter. Practicing the koan mu for days and weeks on end in dirt-poor postwar Japan, Aitken came down with a case of dysentery that almost killed him, and he headed back to Honolulu in 1956.
When he got back he met Anne, the love of his life. The two opened a bookstore together and began hosting meditation groups in their little apartment, using a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon for a meditation bell. Punning on the similarity between the Japanese word ここ and Koko Head, the nearby hill overlooking Hanauma Bay, they called their zendo Koko-an, which means “the little temple right here.” Robert Aitken began to study with Yasutani Rōshi, who had dropped out of the Soto sect and was creating a new school of Zen that included Rinzai practices, like koan work. Aitken received Dharma transmission from Yasutani in 1971, becoming one of the first – if not the first – Westerners to attain the title Rōshi. Back in Hawai’i, Koko-an had grown into the Diamond Sangha, which now has hundreds of members with dozens of teachers in the Americas, Oceania and Europe. Amusingly, most of Aitken Rōshi’s followers in Europe are Catholic monks, nuns and priests.
Anne died in 1994, and even though I never met her I always felt her presence, as well as Rōshi’s pain at her loss. Rōshi was diagnosed with thyroid cancer soon after, and didn’t respond well to chemotherapy. He went into retirement, moving to the Big Island, where his son Tom built a small house next to his own in Kaimu. Tom’s house had been on the ocean until lava from the ongoing eruption of Kilauea extended the shore about 200 yards further away. Rōshi’s house sat on black, ropy pahoehoe lava, and as you did kinhin (walking meditation) on the lanai, you could usually see the big plume of steam where lava was entering the sea a few miles down the coast.
I met Rōshi in 1997. We were fairly sure that he only had a little while to live, especially given that a Swiss student of his had taken him off the chemo and put him on a strict macrobiotic diet. But his hair grew back and his strength returned, and his mind never faltered. I will never forget him ringing the bell for dokusan, and me walking down the tiny hall, doing prostrations by the door to his study, and taking my position knee-to-knee in front of Yasutani Rōshi’s Dharma heir. Trying to meet the piercing gaze of his blue eyes as a voice that seemed to come from Bodhidharma himself inquired “What is mu? Show me mu” may have been some of the hardest shit I will ever have to do.
Rōshi came to my wedding, and gave a Buddhist dedication before the meal. His gift to us was a copy of Blyth sensei’s Zen in English Literature & Oriental Classics, with the inscription “Love, Rōshi” inside. He always had that paradoxical mix of dignity and warmth that he so admired in Blyth sensei. Even when I saw him in town – where he was to all appearances just Bob Aitken, an absent-minded professor buying groceries – he had a solidity and a depth of presence to him that I’d never experienced before, and never since.
Rōshi died yesterday at 93. Born at the tail end of one World War, he lived through the next in “enemy” territory, and was at the center of the profound mixing of cultures that took place in the second half of the 20th century. He was a deep and penetrating student of the Dharma, and played a pivotal role in bringing Zen to the West, adapting it to a non-Japanese context without diluting its essential teachings. He was a pioneer of ‘engaged Buddhism,’ helping create the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and advocating pacifism: not because he was a former POW, but rather as an expression of his essential humanity. He was a steadfast crusader of equal rights for all: not as the father of a gay man, but as someone whose heart had been opened by compassion.
He was my teacher and my friend and the world is poorer without him. But right now, what I’m mourning is my loss, and my broken heart. I’m not that enlightened… not yet, anyway.
I finally found the John Clare poem that Rōshi used to recite all the time: “Little Trotty Wagtail,” he used to say, just showed things as they are, without trying to tell you what to think or feel about them. This was Rōshi’s Zen, then; as Wordsworth put it, “coming forth into the light of things:”
Little trotty wagtail he went in the rain
And tittering tottering sideways he near got straight again
He stooped to get a worm and look’d up to catch a fly
And then he flew away e’re his feathers they were dry
Little trotty wagtail he waddled in the mud
And left his little footmarks trample where he would
He waddled in the water pudge and waggle went his tail
And chirrupt up his wings to dry upon the garden rail
Little trotty wagtail you nimble all about
And in the dimping water pudge you waddle in and out
Your home is nigh at hand and in the warm pigsty
So little Master Wagtail I’ll bid you a ‘Goodbye.’
